Tuesday, 3 June 2014

Nuri Bilgi Ceylan takes the top prize at Cannes

NEWS/GLOBAL

Film director
Nuri Bilge Ceylan won this year’s Palme d’Or for his latest epic Winter Sleep,
beating 17 other contenders for the top prize at Cannes. The film, about a wealth landowner
and his family running a hotel in the snowy Turkish mountains, is Ceylan’s
fifth feature to screen at the prestigious film festival and the first time he
took away the main prize. Previously at Cannes,
he received the Grand Prix twice: for Uzak/Distant
(2002) and again in 2011 for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,
in 2006 his movie Climates won the FIPRESCI prize, and in 2008 he received the Best
Director Award with Three Monkeys.

Director Jane
Campion, who led the Cannes
jury, described Ceylan’s film as "masterful"
and "ruthless".

The film had
created a buzz at Cannes
following its first screening, with critics won over from the first shot. Sydney
Levine wrote in Indie Wire: “The opening
scene of stunning and surrealistic landscape of Cappadocia, Anatolia
immediately establishes this story as exotic and yet familiar. The actor, Haluk
Bilginer, seems to be a familiar type – and in fact, his character is that of a
former actor who has turned hotelier and landowner; he is attractive in an
actor sort of way and seems always somehow distracted while maintaining a
hawk’s eye on the household and area he appears to rule in an almost feudal
style.”

“The 3-½ hours of the film pass without ever
loosing the audience interest as the [story] unfolds about the relationship
among the townspeople and the landowning man who in fact is a tyrant until he
is forced to see his own powerlessness. The philosophic underpinnings,
discussed in several intimate conversations, about the best way to resist evil,
about wealth and the power it bestows and the resentment it engenders finds a
quiet resolution, which arrives unexpectedly along with the end of the story.”

"My starting point is darkness,"
Ceylan told a press conference. "To
search and understand the dark side of my soul."

The premier screening
of Winter Sleep at Cannes on 17 May came just
days after the Soma mining tragedy in Turkey, which claimed 301 lives.
Ceylan, his cast and crew all wore black ribbons to commemorate the dead. At a
press conference following the film’s premier, Ceylan expressed his dismay that
no one had resigned from this Turkish government over the Soma mine disaster. He
said: "In Japan, when someone dies [in an
industrial accident], someone steps down. In Turkey this is not the case. I
don't know why, perhaps it is a cultural difference."

After
learning last week that he had won the main prize, the Turkish film director
then dedicated his award to those who had lost their lives through the Gezi
Uprising that started in May last year.

About Me

Launched in April 2013, T-VINE is the UK's first & only English language consumer publication for British Turks and those interested in the world of Turks. Available quarterly in print and online daily, we cover news, culture, people, places, wellbeing, and lifestyle.